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Environmental Protests Expose Weakness In China's Leadership

This picture taken with a mobile phone on April 3, 2014, shows a line of police standing guard in... [+] front of protesters rallying against a plant producing paraxylene (PX) in front of the government headquarters in Maoming, Guangdong province. Chinese police detained 18 people, state-run media reported on April 4. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

By Samantha Hoffman and Jonathan Sullivan

Mass environmental protests continue to gain strength in China. Within the last couple of months thousands of people in different parts of the country have vocally, and in some cases violently, railed against polluting chemical plants, waste incinerator projects and coal-fired power plant expansions.

New incidents are reported every week through Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. The most recent large-scale incident came on Monday when more than a thousand people took to the streets of Shanghai to protest against the construction of a new chemical plant. Earlier this month a similar number gathered in the suburbs of the northern industrial city of Tianjin claiming that pollution from a nearby steel plant was carcinogenic. Just days earlier thousands of residents in Wuchuan, a city in southern Guangdong, had marched on government offices to oppose plans to build a waste incinerator near their homes.

These waves of protest are unique in that they are uniting China’s working and middle classes under a common grievance. Party leaders fret about political stability and potential challenges to the regime; pollution is one of their greatest concerns. But the Chinese government is failing to address the underlying cause of this discontent – an entrenched public distrust of officialdom – and, in the long term, is risking the possible ‘joining up’ of environmental protests into a widespread movement.

The government’s search for a solution is likely to prove fruitless; its only option appears to be maintaining social unrest at a manageable and local level. For these environmental protests are striking at the heart of the Chinese governance model of ‘adaptive authoritarianism’ and exposing its limitations. The Party’s strategy in dealing with major environmental disputes that bring together local communities across all ages and classes has often been one of short-term appeasement. But when governments are known to make ad-hoc concessions to quell disorder it encourages further episodes of contention.

The anger of protestors, each fighting their own local causes, was vindicated in April when an explosion at a chemical factory producing paraxylene (commonly called PX, and used to produce polyester and plastics) in Zhangzhou, Fujian province, required the attention of the Chinese army’s anti-chemical warfare unit and the evacuation of 30,000 people.

The most vehement dissent has centered on PX and plants like the one in Zhangzhou have become a lightning rod for public dissatisfaction. China is the world’s top producer and consumer of PX, a chemical derived from refined petroleum, and demand is expected to continue to grow. But as private and state owned chemical companies seek to increase production capacity, a series of not-in-my-backyard protests has complicated plant construction across the country.

The last eight years have seen large-scale and violent anti-PX protests in the southern provinces of Guangdong and Yunnan, the eastern provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian, the northern province of Liaoning and the western province of Sichuan. The recent accident in Fujian, where the anti-PX movement began in 2007, has brought the problem full circle, and reveals the paucity of options in the government’s playbook.

At that first anti-PX protest thousands of people in Xiamen, an affluent wealthy city on the eastern coast, forced the government to suspend construction of a proposed plant. Faced with unprecedented numbers of protesters from among the urban and middle class rather than disenfranchised farmers, the provincial government quietly changed its plans and built the plant in poorer, smaller Zhangzhou, the site of the recent accident.

The project went ahead and has been a source of contention ever since. An explosion hit the plant in July 2013, and a year later hundreds of local residents surrounded the plant for several days to protest against toxic emissions, disrupting production and leading to violent clashes with police.

In a country where dangerously polluting industries are legion, it is PX that has captured the Chinese public’s imagination and growing awareness and concern about environmental pollution has coalesced around opposition to it. While exposure to the chemical can be harmful, safely constructed and regulated plants do not pose a great safety risk. Indeed, PX plants are located all over the world, and yet the only large-scale protests in opposition to them are in China.

The government has tried, and failed, to convince the public that PX projects are safe. Partly this is due to the government’s typically clumsy delivery, for instance a month before the 2013 explosion in Zhangzhou, the People’s Daily claimed that PX was “no more harmful than a cup of coffee.” Statements like these are only likely to make residents more skeptical of official pronouncements.

More salient are the low levels of trust— or rather the active mistrust— inspired by Chinese central and local governments, and companies. There is no evidence that long-term exposure to PX causes cancer, one of the protesters’ key anxieties, but Chinese have good reason to be disbelieving of official sources—the cover up and withholding of information about the deadly SARS virus in 2003 is just one example.

While well-regulated PX plants are relatively safe, Chinese are well aware that strong regulation and good governance are rare commodities in their country. Suspicion of local officials is rife. People realize that local governments receive huge financial incentives to establish new waste-disposal and chemical plant projects and, ultimately, to prioritize economic growth above all else, including adequate safety measures.

Pollution is one of the main issues on peoples’ minds. With the air they breathe and the water they drink serving as constant reminders, the issue is not going away. Sensing a turning of the public mood, the central government has responded to fear and discontent. During the National People’s Congress (NPC) in March, President Xi pledged that the government would “punish with an iron hand any violators who destroy China’s ecology or environment.”

There might be a real attempt to accompany this rhetoric with action. In April the government released data on enforcement of the updated Environmental Protection Law that took effect at the beginning of the year. It said daily-accumulating pollution fines were imposed on 26 companies, plants belonging to 527 companies were closed and a further 207 businesses were ordered to suspend operations.

However, this is a mere drop in the ocean. Even if the law does prove moderately effective in the short term, it may not be enough to shift public perception.

To date, the characteristics of a particular environmental protest have largely determined the government’s way of managing the immediate crisis, and there is a clear correlation between greater numbers and the government’s willingness to cancel a controversial project. But projects are rarely cancelled outright; often they are simply relocated. And government treatment of protesters tends to harden once the immediate threat to social stability has subsided. For example, in January 2013 authorities in Dalian tried six activist leaders from the 2010 anti-PX protests in that city for “libel” and “deliberately concocting false information to terrorize the public.”

After years of sacrificing the environment in the name of growth, pollution is now a key political issue. A powerful documentary film on the causes of China’s air pollution Under The Dome, made by Chai Jing, a former reporter for Chinese state television, captured the zeitgeist, registering over 300 million views before censors removed it from the Internet. The striking aspect of this episode was the fact that the film was originally approved by China’s official censors as part of government efforts to show it is serious about acknowledging the scale of its pollution problem and cleaning up its act.

The film also publicized the Blue Map app, the creation of leading environmentalist Ma Jun and again approved for release by China’s censors. The app, which was downloaded three million times following the film’s release, publishes real-time emissions data, which people can use to challenge polluting factories in their local area.

The welcome move to empower the public through the use of data will further test China’s ‘adaptive authoritarian’ model as it seeks to achieve a balance between concessions and control. In the case of PX for example, odds are stacked against officials hoping to push forward with a project without incident.

To date protests have remained localized. For now at least atomized environmental protests are unlikely to develop into a large-scale, countrywide social movement. But things in China have a habit of changing fast. Until recently, the government had been able to avoid large-scale unrest, because although people had been aware of the public health risks, they had accepted pollution as an inevitable consequence of welcomed economic growth, or they had been conditioned to feel powerless to do anything about it. With time, attitudes have shifted and people are increasingly demanding a better government response.

Short-term thinking that sacrifices the environment for GDP and ad hoc, superficial responses to protest events are not viable options if China is serious about curbing its pollution. This is the new situation to which the government must adapt, or, further down the line, run the risk of separate local protests turning into a coordinated, nationwide rebellion.

Samantha Hoffman is an independent analyst and PhD researcher at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham. Jonathan Sullivan is Deputy Director of the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham.

Protesters wearing masks hold banners during a demonstration against plans for a factory to produce... [+] paraxylene (PX) in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan province on May 4, 2013. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)